What I thought before the war in Iraq
Oct. 24th, 2004 09:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovI came down on the wimpy, "Well, it doesn't have to be a disaster" side. To be fair, it still doesn't have to be a disaster, but it sure doesn't look good.
I have an allergy to most right-wing writing. That "I'm going to tell you what you have to do and pretend that it's the universe imposing obligations" tone drives me up the wall. Logically, it's no worse than the left-wing "I'm going to tell you what you have to do to be a decent person and pretend that it's a universal obligation", but my emotional reaction is very different. There's plenty of evidence that many people have the opposite reactions, but I have to take what they say on faith--I can't imagine what it's like to be them.
In any case, I only notice flaws in things I can pay attention to, so I was reading left-wing anti-war stuff and noticing some flaws. In particular, they say "Iraq is a sovreign nation!" and I'd think, "But Germany and Japan were rebuilt successfully". It seemed to me that they were expressing something as a general principle which was only true some of the time.
They'd say, "WWII was different", but if anyone published a list of the ways that WWII was different (especially if it was published before the war in Iraq), I'd be quite interested in a link. At this point, I think of "WWII was different" as parent-speak--the state in which one may be saying something true, but where it seems so utterly obvious that one doesn't offer any convincing explanations. I try to avoid parent-speak, but even without children, it becomes more tempting as the years go by.
Also, people seemed to be saying both that Bush was a puppet and that he was insisting on a war in Iraq because of his own psychological motivations. No one seemed to notice that these can't both be true. This lack of attention to logic made the anti-war side seem less credible. In theory, the puppet masters could have been using/amplifying Bushes stuff about Iraq for their own nefarious purposes, but I don't remember anyone saying that.
There were some people saying, "It doesn't have to be a disaster, but the people running it are blithering idiots"--I wish I'd listened more carefully to that part.
I have an allergy to most right-wing writing. That "I'm going to tell you what you have to do and pretend that it's the universe imposing obligations" tone drives me up the wall. Logically, it's no worse than the left-wing "I'm going to tell you what you have to do to be a decent person and pretend that it's a universal obligation", but my emotional reaction is very different. There's plenty of evidence that many people have the opposite reactions, but I have to take what they say on faith--I can't imagine what it's like to be them.
In any case, I only notice flaws in things I can pay attention to, so I was reading left-wing anti-war stuff and noticing some flaws. In particular, they say "Iraq is a sovreign nation!" and I'd think, "But Germany and Japan were rebuilt successfully". It seemed to me that they were expressing something as a general principle which was only true some of the time.
They'd say, "WWII was different", but if anyone published a list of the ways that WWII was different (especially if it was published before the war in Iraq), I'd be quite interested in a link. At this point, I think of "WWII was different" as parent-speak--the state in which one may be saying something true, but where it seems so utterly obvious that one doesn't offer any convincing explanations. I try to avoid parent-speak, but even without children, it becomes more tempting as the years go by.
Also, people seemed to be saying both that Bush was a puppet and that he was insisting on a war in Iraq because of his own psychological motivations. No one seemed to notice that these can't both be true. This lack of attention to logic made the anti-war side seem less credible. In theory, the puppet masters could have been using/amplifying Bushes stuff about Iraq for their own nefarious purposes, but I don't remember anyone saying that.
There were some people saying, "It doesn't have to be a disaster, but the people running it are blithering idiots"--I wish I'd listened more carefully to that part.
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Well, I was mostly just listening to NPR then
Date: 2004-10-24 08:47 am (UTC)One thing that reading actual source materials, even conflicting ones, rather than the Approved Versions of history of "The Good War" generated from 1950 on yields, is that most of our assumptions about it, based on the Approved Versions, are wrong. There was infinitely more screw-up and CF and mendacity and evil stupidity on the part of the Allies than we're allowed to think or say. There was much more culpablity among the "Good Guys" in the decades of
enablingabetting"peace" leading up to 1939, on both sides of both oceans.But, beyond all that, there's the fact that we hadn't been involved in playing politics for most of a century on a deranged level in Germany and Japan to the extent we had been in Iraq. We hadn't been bombing, on a regular basis - and shooting for target-practice, if a soldier I once went out with is correct - from the air for a decade over Germany and Japan, prior to beginning the war. We didn't subsequently put people with no clue but ideological purity in charge, but rather people with some familiarity and respect for the local cultures, like MacArthur, in those countries. We didn't go in with no meaningful intelligence nor intelligence gathering capacity, trusting in our wondrous machines to do it all for us, in the forties, to countries where we had no one who spoke the local language and knew the territory. And the Marshall Plan was not conceived primarily as a Get-Rich-Quick Scheme for White House cronies, which is something that was obvious about this crew from their behaviour all through 2001.
And then there is the fooged-together-like-Yugoslavia aspect of Mesopotamia, and the history of dirty dealing and Oil Companies that goes right back to the days of El Aurens and Standard Oil and the fabrication of the House of Saud, who, like Hussein, may be monsters but are *our* monsters, and the fact that we have never dealt in good faith out there, so why should anyone think we were going to start now? and Democracy? yeah, just like with the Marcos family, don't make me laugh, we don't care, just look at Egypt and how "tough" we are on human rights with our
satrapsallies so long as they let us use their canals or their natural resources.I mean, what about Katyn Forest? All that romantic talk about the Noble Poles through the War, and then 1945, Yalta, back of the hand from Churchill and Roosevelt -- What about Beria, and Hungary and all? Symbiotic relationships with our enemies to keep the war machines running are nothing new.
(Spending hours of each week buried in the crumbling periodicals archives and crackling microfilms as a teenager created a cynicism reserve deep as the Marianas Trench...)
For it to be ever anything but a Fiasco, with a capital F, it would require there to be a) intelligent people of b) good will and c) financial disinterest d) running things. Since this was not the case and remains improbable as long as the crew is in power, and since they have demonstrated themselves RWA to grab and spoil whatever they can, Kerry's remark that they will leave him a Lebanon is entirely apropos. All the talk about them putting off an offensive until after Nov 3, rumors leaked for days before confirmed, prove that they have no concern whatsoever for making it succeed.
This is like one of those industrial accidents where someone is halfway caught in heavy machinery. There is no good ending to this, even if we survive it.